The forum landscape seems to changed quite a bit in the last couple years with some of the fallout of vB. I wanted to see what people thought about the current options out there from a pure SEO perspective. I agree the best SEO practice is to run a great forum with great content, but once you have that question is how much does your software make a difference? I would think it does make a difference and it's astonishing how many don't follow google's own SEO guidelines.

In my mind these are the leading players at this moment. -vBulletin -IP.Board -UBB.threads -SMF -XenForo -Any others?

Any particular reason you've left out phpBB? I'm not exactly sure how search engine friendly it is out of the box, but the community is large and offers plenty of tips and modifications that allow you to exercise more control over the things that matter to search engines.

That can be said about phpBB2 but that is not the case with phpBB3. Before it's release it went though a paid security audit with no major vulnerabilities found. It's track record since it's release in late '07 is outstanding.

IP.Board has come a long way with SEO but there are some issues that the software vendors just don't quite 'get'. In the current release of the software, 301 redirects for permalinks is broken. Even though myself and other customers have raised the issue with Invisionpower, they've classed it as low priority and are refusing to fix it until the next minor version release... so all my permalink redirects are currently broken, and have been for months. The rel="canonical" tags are taking care of it, but Invisionpower just don't get it.

Any of them... you have to edit the skin templates and make it look and feel how you want it to. If you don't have the time or skill to achieve that, there are usually free or paid templates available.

One thing that characterizes WebmasterWorld is lean code and light pages. Achieving this with one of the big forum packages may be a little tough, as they tend to suffer from feature bloat. In the past, members have posted about lightweight forum packages. Seems like "Simple Machines" was one, and there were a few other minimalist forums. Anyone still using these?

One thing that characterizes WebmasterWorld is lean code and light pages. Achieving this with one of the big forum packages may be a little tough, as they tend to suffer from feature bloat. In the past, members have posted about lightweight forum packages. Seems like "Simple Machines" was one, and there were a few other minimalist forums. Anyone still using these?

thank you - I am a HUGE fan of minimalism - and am toying with the idea of starting an anti complexity movement to make these types of programs more freely available ;) I think there is a huge opportunity here for any companies that want rapid market uptake. When are they going to get it that 'most' people want efficiency not complexity. Our lives are already complex.

bbPress is not just a WordPress plugin, but standalone forum software developed by the creators of Wordpress. I like their philosophy, but I'm not sure they're living up to it with (what I've seen of) bbPress.

As for lightweight forum packages, I'd vote for phpBB. I'm not sure how lean the actual code is, but the software allows me to output lightweight pages without sacrificing functionality, using a simple but powerful templating system.

I started out with vBulletin, but just trying to get rid of all those site-wide JavaScript files gave me enough of a headache to begin looking for an alternative. Same goes for most commercial forum software (IP.Board, XenForo, etc).

FluxBB is another promising package, but as of yet it does not have a proper templating system.

The thing with open source/free forum systems is security. Commercial products like IPB use external security auditors as well as their own internal checks. When flaws are found, they are quickly patched. If your website is your livelihood, this should obviously be prioritised.

Again phpBB's track record since late '07 speaks for itself. Of the 5 issues Secunia lists only one could be considered serious. They introduced RSS feeds in 3.0.7 and it was possible for someone to read private forums. The patch was issued immediately as soon as it was found.

Interesting. I'm looking at adding forums to translated versions of my website, but the license of my IPB installation forbids using it across domains, and the cost of a separate license for each language is cost prohibitive... so it's interesting to read about the possibilities with free stuff.

If it were me doing this from scratch I wouldn't use different domains. Different language packs are available and when the user registers they have the option of choosing their own language.

From there you can apply a different theme to any forum. Templates are inherited so you could for example just alter the CSS. You would have visually different forum for each language. AFAIK there is no option out the box for applying a default language to specific forums but should be an easy modification if you can't.

Th benefit of course is you have it all under one login, the user can navigate to different forums with other languages.

Separate tld domains are very useful for site translations, the benefits far outweigh the extra effort. Furthermore, you don't need separate logins, as IPB (which I use) has a 'Converge' system where multiple forums can use the same core member database.

I've done some research on this and concluded that VBulletin would be the best for my needs. But now that I'm getting ready to implement it, one question comes up. How easy is it to integrate user authentication for VBulletin with the user authentication for the existing site? Has anybody tried this?